This month’s book picks have got all your interests covered. Want to learn your history? That’s covered. Itching to read a selection from a classic literary/sci-fi author? Covered. Getting ready for the upcoming tenth anniversary of 9/11? Also covered, not to mention the most essential travel guide you’ll ever need.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles Mann

This follow up to Mann’s bestseller 1491 focuses not only on the environmental changes that Columbus brought to the Americas but the economic unification of the world brought about by a Spaniard named Legazpi, who succeeded where Columbus failed by establishing trade with China.

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In June there were quite a few good nonfiction books published while July brought fiction to the forefront with inward-looking anti-heroes as well as political satire and a fascinating re-imagining of one fabulous woman’s life in the gilded age.

Millennium People by J.G. Ballard

The late literary icon J.G. Ballard’s penultimate novel is his first new book to be published in America in nearly a decade. The surrealist master examines the social malaise of the middle classes in this brilliant political satire, in which a psychologist attempts to stop a British-based terrorist group who is stirring the middle class into anarchy by way of violence.

Nonfiction had a good showing in the month of June with two anniversary editions of bestsellers: one of which will teach you about America’s past and the other will teach us about its future endeavors. I find that nonfiction books for the general reader, like these, are always a fun way to learn about the complicated things I normally wouldn’t dream of reading about.

The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must by Robert Zubrin

Robert Zubrin is an engineer and creator of Mars Direct, a blueprint for settling the red planet, which has altered completely the way scientists view the potential to do so. This fifteenth anniversary edition of The Case for Mars details how the American Space Program can accomplish such a task. More importantly, Zubrin explains that Mars’ resources make it possible to produce oxygen and fuel. Just the mind-blowing idea of people not only going to, but living on, Mars in our lifetime is enough reason to pick up this book.

Fans of the printed word rejoice. The books are getting better and better as the year unfolds. New picks from Otto Penzler, Lisa See, and Erik Larsen.

The Big Book of Adventure Stories edited by Otto Penzler
This is a collection of the best adventures stories of all time including “The Cisco Kid”; “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle”; “Bulldog Drummond”; “Tarzan”; “The Scarlet Pimpernel”; “Conan the Barbarian”; “Hopalong Cassidy”; “King Kong”; “Zorro”; and “The Spider”.